[ad_1]
Refreshed or new products that Apple talked about during its extravagant night this week, I am particularly curious about Arcade, the monthly subscription of $ 5 for video games for iPhone and iPad.
The success of Arcade depends on Apple's ability to change an established pattern for so-called casual mobile games. These entertainment – think Pokemon Go or Clash of Clans rather than lavish Xbox or PlayStation video games – tend to be free to download and play. Companies earn money by displaying advertisements in games or by persuading users to buy digital trinkets as an advanced virtual weapon.
In short, Apple wants people to pay $ 5 a month for the types of games they have free access to, but no ads or in-app purchases. This proposal makes Arcade an intriguing test of Apple's ability to reshape an industry, consumer behavior, and pricing models. (Other companies, including Microsoft's Xbox and Google, have or are trying to create subscription models, but for high-end gaming.)
Apple being Apple, it could work – or not. Among Apple's Wall Street observers, no one seems confident that the company can run a mobile gaming subscription, but few people predict a failure. This makes Arcade the technological product of the moment for popcorn.
Apple generally has the deserved reputation of transforming consumer behavior or generalizing niche behaviors. Apple has trivialized the interaction with computers with a mouse and a graphical representation of a desktop. Apple was not the first company to cut discs into digital files like MP3s, but the music industry became interested in it and made song downloads easy and attractive for everyone.
Today, I'm not sure that Apple can shape people's habits as it sees fit.
Back to the past
Yes, tens of millions of people subscribe to Apple Music, but Spotify had already persuaded the world's music leaders and several million consumers to adopt streaming. It does not seem that Apple has persuaded many people to have subscribed to digital information publications. Apple executives hardly mention Apple News +, six months old, if only to recognize that it exists.
And with Arcade, Apple goes back in the past. When smartphone games started about a decade ago, titles like Temple Run and Angry Birds cost a dollar or a few dollars to buy. But once the developers made their creations for free from the start, the popularity of mobile games exploded. Even though a fraction of people pay for items in the game, small purchases add up to widely used games. And many players will gladly accept some advertisements.
Apple is not about to dump free video games from its App Store. Consumers spend more than $ 100 billion a year on app downloads and purchases from Apple, Android, Google, and other online stores. Mobile video games generate about three quarters of that, according to App Annie, a mobile data and market analysis company. Think of Arcade as an addition to an already large and successful model of free games.
Apple feels an opportunity here, and that could be right. There are horror stories of mobile games that seem designed to get people out of their money. The industry has helped pioneers to do psychological tricks to entice players to pay for ways to get ahead in games.
Apple would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure Arcade video games, which will allow developers to not find solutions to extract additional nickels from players. Apple also selects titles for Arcade manually, and many Apple device owners trust the company to offer them convenient and fun video games for their $ 5 a month.
If Apple can sell people on Arcade, expect imitators. In anticipation of the Apple event, Google has confirmed the confirmation of its own subscription service similar to Arcade for Android phones. It seems that Apple has already folded the rest of the industry to its will. – (c) Bloomberg LP in 2019
[ad_2]
Source link